Undemocratic. What else do you call an election where the top vote-getter can lose?

Thank the recent presidential election for revealing the one-armed bandit hidden inside the shiny surface of U.S. democracy. A tails-I-win-heads-you-lose machine designed to cheat anyone who pulls its lever.

Sure, the discarded votes, the confusing ballots, the moving polling places in Black neighborhoods, the Jewish votes for a Hitler admirer, and the ever-changing results say a lot about just how much "your vote counts."

But it’s the Electoral College that shows the machine is designed undemocratic.

‘To know something, know its origin,’ quoth the wise man. So let’s journey back and watch our fore-fathers build --and rig-- "American democracy."

Of course the most striking characteristic of the newly-liberated colonies -- besides all being stolen from native peoples-- is that half of them are slave-holding societies. Not just that they have slaves, but that slavery is their entire way of life.

Their very existence depends on kidnapping millions of men, women and children, buying and selling them, and constantly maintaining a system of terror, subjugation, and, well, enslavement.

Preserving that is the most crucial question when the U.S. Constitution is written. The slavocracy --worried that their Northern partners might someday jeopardize their system-- insists on numerous "checks and balances" to prevent majority rule. After all, what if a majority of Americans want to ban slavery?

But even the checks and balances aren’t enough for them. Since ‘slaves aren’t humans’, the South will never have enough representatives in Congress or popular votes in a presidential election.

So a deal is struck -- inflate the Southern white population by adding in Blacks ... counted as three-fifths of a person.

But since Blacks can’t vote, how to apportion their three-fifths of a "ballot?"

One way -- Electoral College. Winner-take-all vote by whites, and a second real election by the Electoral College, number of Electors determined by population ... with Blacks tossed in as three-fifths of a person each, thank you very much.

But it gets worse. Remember the checks and balances against majority rule? Not just Southern slavers think it’s a good idea. Northern merchants know they’re living at the expense of the majority, even with only propertied white men allowed to vote. What could be more dangerous to their privileges than majority rule?

Don’t take it from me, listen to right-wing columnist Steven Chapman who’s proud that "our system incorporates a variety of mechanisms meant not to facilitate action and empower the people, but to prevent action, slow things down and ward off the excesses of popular rule.... The founders...had deep reservations about democracy, which they feared would degenerate into tyranny by the majority."

Tyranny of the majority? That’s what most people call democracy -- majority rule.

But that’s why you don’t elect the president. The Electoral College does.

And that’s why it votes a month and half after the popular election -- to "allow popular passions to cool."

And that’s why the Electors are not bound to vote the way their state did. That’s right -- they can vote any way they want. Florida could go ten-to-one for Gore, but any Elector is entirely free to cast his vote for Bush ... or Buchanan.

Like some fiendish board game, the path to the presidency is built with appalling obstacles designed to stop an honest working person --a representative of the majority-- from making it to the goal. Age and citizenship limitations take out half the population right at the start. Trapdoors marked "news media" and "debates" make you invisible. A chasm needs filling with two or three hundred million dollars.

But if --despite all this-- somehow a representative of the majority makes it to the palace gates (a Black socialist only by Heavenly intervention), camping out for six weeks is required..

Above hangs one of those cartoon weights marked FIVE TONS. That’s the Electoral College.

That’s undemocratic. And that’s why --short of deep-going changes the Constitution’s designed to prevent-- this product of slavery will never be eliminated.

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